After the flood of Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu 6.10 reviews, here is a review of PC-BSD 1.3 Beta. "PC-BSD has improved quite a bit and the use of its open-source PBI packaging system is a great idea. Although it obviously means there might be a minor delay in newly released products being ported over to the PBI package system, novice users will rejoice because the wait is well worth it. PC-BSD is a well oiled machine with its quick response times, even if you don't have that much memory in your system. Its implementation of a clean interface is welcomed by me and not having a 3D enabled desktop is not something I really would worry about unless you are an eye-candy lover."

It is true there are some technical issues that need solving but the easy way for users is the right way.

The problem with shipping with full dependencies comes from open source software.

In closed source software rarely do companies use shared libraries as they are plagued by copyright and patent issues.

Open source on the other hand is all about sharing. This means most projects use shared libraries. Now this is not te actual problem. The problem is library writers keep breaking compatibility with older versions as new ones ship. Aditionally, there seems to be no teamwork from the library maintainers and app maintainers to do joint testing before libraries ship.

This means the shared library maintainer will work on the library to achieve whichever his goals are (for his app) and releases it even if it breaks other apps using it. This is bad.

I see some ways out of this.

1- Lib maintainers and lib users work together and libs take a little bit longer to release but keep backwards compatibility.

2- Libs start being named with full version number "libblabla2.2.3.4" so they can be used side by side with different versions and app maintainersupgrade when they are ready.

3- Something like GoboLinux

4- PBI

Dependencies are not an option, this issue must be killed.

Having said this, the PBIs are the best end user experience so far when well built. notice this is sometimes hard as some apps are just nasty either because legal reasons or technical.

But as i agree the PBIs aren't perfect YET, i think PC-BSD is on the right way...